Eric Hobsbawm turned history into an art

Hay Festival Director Peter Florence remembers the intellectual
vitality of his friend Eric Hobsbawm -- and the titanic debates he had with
Niall Ferguson, Simon Schama and Christopher Hitchens.

The late historian Eric Hobsbawm at his home in London Photo: Anne Katrin Purkiss / Rex Features

By Peter Florence

10:58AM BST 05 Oct 2012

I knew Eric for twenty-five years, which would in any other life seem a long time. But I realise now that he must’ve been in his seventies when I first heard his voice, first sat down to eat and learn. It’s very hard to reconcile that idea of age with the dynamic, inspiring man who loved the elegance and energy of argument, and who elevated the writing of history back into one of the great literary arts.

His sessions at the Hay Festivalwere always thrilling, particularly the combative conversations with Christopher Hitchens and Simon Schama that flare with brilliance and wit. His riveting argument with Niall Ferguson about the legacy of the Congress of Vienna is the historiographer’s equivalent of Fischer vs Spassky. He spoke in perfect Spanish in Segovia, in Italian in Mantova, and his Portuguese was pretty hot too.

For all that Eric’s long relationship with Hay was driven by his rooting himself and his family up the road in Erwood, it was Eric who started our love affair with Latin America, and who is indirectly responsible for the Hay Festival now being in Colombia and Mexico, and set fair to expand into Chile and Peru in the next two years.

Ten years ago I went to Parati on the Amazon rainforest coast to help the great Bloomsbury publisher, Liz Calder set up the festival that became FLIP. I went into the local bookshop and asked in a faltering mash of Portuguese and Tourist who the best-selling English language writer in Brazil was. The bookseller smiled broadly and said "Enrique Hobsbawm." "No, no," I said, puzzled.. Obviously I must’ve used the wrong word. "Sorry. I mean who sells the most books in Brazil?" Same smile, same reply. Non-plussed, but delighted, I asked how this was possible. Lula had just taken office as the country’s first ever socialist President and in his inaugural address he had said that the main influence on his thinking was the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Brazilian readers went crazy for Eric. So I emailed him from the one internet café in town and explained where I was and asked if he’d come. He was online. "Parati-Shmarati," came the immediate reply. "I love the town. I was there in the ’50s with Che Guevara." He came, aged 85, and it was like hanging out with Ayrton Senna. The President sent his Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, to welcome Eric to the town and inaugurate the festival with the entire Brazilian media in tow. There was music, and speeches and ideas. And the kind of superstardom that makes things happen and changes lives.

What’s interesting about this story is not just the joke of that glamorous celebrity can attach itself even to the most intellectual of academics. It’s that what Lula got from Eric was a willingness to learn from history’s swinging pendulum, to understand the application of Marxist dialectic to the contemporary world of developing nations and emerging democracies. Crucially, the Brazilian model shows how contradictions might be embraced instead of simply u-turning till you’re going round in circles, and now they’re the most dynamic economy and society in the world. The competing ideologies that flipped the world during Eric’s lifetime will have consequences that are being played by the BRIC societies who weave community and capital more cleverly than the Western powers are managing.

The question about whether Eric would renounce his enthusiasm for Communism because of Stalin’s atrocities is dull because it’s the wrong question. It’s a question for a politician not an historian. Better to ask what has come of the failures of Left and Right. For that we need only read the books he wrote about the 20th century, specifically Age of Extremes, How To Change The World and his memoir Interesting Times. I think Lula read him as well and as cleverly as anyone. We can too.